A Thousand Things to Talk About

The lexicon available to us to express delight, excitement, joy, or any number of other emotions, doesn’t always feel quite adequate, at least in the English language. There could be ten thousand available words, but that doesn’t mean one will fit like you need or want it to.

Then, in 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary added “squee” to the official list of quote-unquote real words in the English language, defining it as an exclamation used to express great delight or excitement. But, as per usual, that’s not where the story of squee began.

Instead, squee started around 1865, when it was used to describe a high-pitched squealing or squeaking sound in the sentence “when, squee, rhepe, twiddle, went the third violin.” Then in the comic Magnus Robot Fighter 4000 AD, the comics used the word “squee” to describe the sound of a robot dying after it’s been killed by the hero.

And then, it was in a 1998 Usenet group conversation in that the modern usage of squee has been tracked down to. Someone was chatting about getting something Star Wars in the mail and expressed their happiness and excitement.

The reaction we as humans have to seeing something cute is pretty universal, and while the sound and the language we use to express the excitement may change… but a sound of squee seems pretty universal.

The McMillian Dictionary Blog wrote, quote:

The word ‘binge’ first appeared in English in the mid-1800s to mean ‘to soak’. Around the time of World War I, the term ‘binge’ was used to refer to eating or drinking in excess. The term binge-watching can be traced back as far as 2003, but it didn’t come into common usage until around 2012.

Just because we didn’t start hearing the phrase binge-watching until more recently, quoting from a Morning Consult article:

Derek Johnson, associate professor of media and culture studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the concept of binge-watching isn’t new or limited just to streaming services, given that cable channels will stack episodes of the same show next to each other. “There’s potential for binge-viewing in classical, network television schedules,” he said. “Looking at cable channels during the daytime, a huge number of cable channels and electronic programming are blocks of these back-to-back episodes.”

In other words, who cares if it’s on Netflix, Hulu, HBO now, or any one of hundreds of other services, channels, or even stored media options — a huge number of individuals have binge-watched something when they have the option.

In 2017, Netflix released statistics on the quote-unquote year of binge watching. And those statistics revealed a lot. As Inverse.com reported, quote:

Netflix also combed through aggregate user data to find some interesting stats on our collective binge-watching tendencies. Generally, members complete their first binge in only three days. The most popular shows to binge first were Orange is the New Black, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead, in that order.

Then again, binge watching might be entirely in who you ask. After all, Netlix defines binge watching as completing at least one season of a show within a week. Meanwhile, academic researchers are looking at binge watching as watching two or more consecutive episodes of a show, at least once a week.

Taking that second definition, According to a new Morning Consult/Hollywood Reporter poll, 60 percent of adults who watch shows on demand said they binge-watch […] with 15 percent reporting they binge each day, 28 percent several times per week and 17 percent about once per week.

So whatever it is you choose to watch, if you make the choice to binge-watch, you’re not alone.

There’s probably about a thousand different angles one could take on personal emergency preparedness — and the short version is, not nearly enough people are, or even feel that they are, prepared for emergencies. There’s a variety of reasons for this, ranging from the fact that preparedness can be expensive to the fact that we tend to view threats that are amorphous and unclear as non-existent.

But – what can get very interesting is the fact that individuals aren’t the only ones that need to prepare for emergencies. Governments also prepare for emergencies of various types — and are often asked to be the first responders when emergencies happen.

In 2014, researchers dug in to the level of disaster and emergency preparedness in all 27 EU member states. That research utilized the World Health Organization checklist, and found, quote:

The average level of disaster management preparedness in the health systems of 27 European Union member states was 68% (Acceptable). The highest level of preparedness was seen in the United Kingdom, Luxemburg, and Lithuania. Considering the elements of disaster management system, the highest level of preparedness score was at health information elements (86%), and the lowest level was for hospitals, and educational elements (54%).

In other words, emergency preparedness isn’t necessarily something that every government just magically gets right either. It’s all a matter of doing our best, and for many of us, our best may or may not be ready for whatever emergencies we may face.  

I’ll give fair warning here — if you have any kind of a fraught relationship with food, then following up on any of the research mentioned in today’s episode (or heck, today’s episode in general) could be very triggering. I offer this warning as a fat — and happily so — person myself, and as someone who takes issue with how much obesity is turned into a boogeyman in research.

All of that said, there’s a LOT of research out there about how parents, teachers, child-care workers, and the environment around kids helps develop and nurture their relationship to food. And while a lot of the research is tied back to obesity for headlines or in order to describe health outcomes, the research is still valid, often at least, when viewed through the lens of intuitive eating.

In a study about parenting practices with adolescents published in a 2013 edition of the journal Pediatrics, researchers found that even into the teen years, parents are much more likely to engage in one of two controlling food related-practices, either pressure-to-eat or artificial food restriction.

It doesn’t tend to start in the teen years, however. It starts much younger and the impacts last much longer. As a 2018 paper called “Justifying by Healthifying” found that the clean-your-plate mentality — otherwise called “consumption closure,” creates a mindset where we underestimate the caloric load of a food and overestimate the health value of just about any kind of food if we’re primed to eat most or all of it.

As Parents magazine quoted:

“If children are encouraged to eat when they’re not hungry often enough, they can lose touch with the signals of hunger and fullness and are more prone to overeat,” says Katja Rowell, M.D., a childhood feeding specialist. “I think many adults have lost touch with their own hunger and fullness cues and don’t trust that children can manage their own eating. It helps to remember that only the child knows how much he is hungry for. Some days he may eat a lot, other days less.”

In other words, it’s when we force ourselves – or force kids – to ignore their body’s signals for hunger and fullness, that we start to lose touch with those signals.

It wasn’t too very long ago that we talked about those who report themselves as having no religion, and the worldwide trends that play into that conversation.

One thing we didn’t talk about, however, was faith. Not faith in the religious sense, but faith in the sense of having a very strong belief in, trust in, or confidence in something. Not necessarily a higher power even — just confidence or belief in anything at all.

Philosopher Nein Van Leeuwen, in his paper “Religious Credence is not Factual Belief” presents the idea of credences – a mental state or a moral choice to defer to those we see as authorities. If we see someone as trustworthy, then we tend to take on the beliefs they present to us, even if we don’t fully understand those beliefs.

This is why often times, those with very strong political beliefs may not be able to tell you down to the dollar or the study the reason for those beliefs, or those that join a cult follow along, when all reason would lead us to a different conclusion. As researchers put it in the book “The Engima of Reason” and it was reported in The New Yorker, quote:

Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

And that collaboration itself may be part of the reason we are willing to put faith in something — even when we don’t fully understand it. Quoting from that same New Yorker article:

In “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.

In other words, our very mental and social existence may come down to faith in many ways. Faith isn’t and doesn’t have to be religious – it just has to rely on trust and confidence. As Peter Thompson wrote in the Guardian, quote:

any movement that seeks social change and improvement is a faith-based one. It has to be, otherwise there would be no reason to hope for something better. The more economy and society changes its moral and ethical ground, the more there will be a desire to bind us back in to the old certainties. There is probably no way of effectively mobilising people against […] if they don’t believe in something, no matter how abstract or apparently bizarre it may seem to others.

In 2013, two researchers published in the Journal of Psychology integration a review of the research and discussion of the phenomena of self-criticism. That particular paper defined self-criticism as, quote:

a conscious evaluation of one-self that can be a healthy and reflexive behavior, but also can have harmful effects and consequences for an individual.

In other words, reflecting upon your thoughts, beliefs, words and actions can be very useful. But like all things that get a bit overwhelming in too heavy of a dose, self-criticism tends to tip the scale into a harmful realm when it becomes harmful.

Generally, the research on individuals who are very self-critical and/or perfectionist tends to treat those particular behaviors as associated behaviors – or even symptoms of – depression and anxiety. But several researchers are starting to dig in to the idea that perhaps, rather than a symptom alone, that even neurotypical individuals may have topics or areas where they are very self-critical in ways that become damaging.

And while it can be tempting to think that being hard on yourself is part of what drives success, it’s worth paying attention to the conclusion of the 2011 article “The Effects of Self-Criticism and Self-Oriented Perfectionism on Goal Pursuit:”

Although self-criticism has previously been shown to be related to diminished goal progress, a controversy remains regarding the potential association between aspects of “positive perfectionism,” such as self-oriented perfectionism, and enhanced goal progress. The results of the five studies demonstrated a consistent pattern of negative association between self-criticism and goal progress.

Leadership is one of those topics that seems to come up time and time again. Back in episode 486, we examined what it means to be a supervisor, and the fact that only one-third or so of people aspire to any kind of leadership at all. Even with that, however, it’s often true that those who become leaders may or may not have wanted to be named that, or are even officially in leadership positions.

Once you are in a leadership position – if you want to be or not – there is no dearth of options of what kind of leader you might be, number of books to read about leadership, or even entire degrees of every level you can get in leadership studies.

The HubSpot blog outlines seven different types of leadership styles, ranging from democratic to autocratic, strategic to transactional.

Meanwhile, the Association for Talent Development instead breaks leadership up into five styles – managerial, relational, motivational, inspirational, and transformational.

Blog WiseToast goes even further, with 12 different types of leadership outlined and The Executive Connection outlines nine common leadership styles.

While there’s crossover in all of these, there’s also a drive here similar to ones we have talked about in the past – a drive to categorize and organize the experiences we have, ways we interact with others, and ways we think about ourselves in a way that may be useful to us. The power of that kind of examination, however, comes not in the fact that we can name our leadership style (official or not) as one thing or the other — the power comes in using that information, feedback, and  framework as a jumping off point for determining how we want to interact with that world.

There’s a variety of things that could be called “allergies,” and often are called allergies by those who experience reactions to various types of foods. Medically, an allergy is when there’s an immunological reaction to a particular food that causes hives, anaphylaxis, itching, sneezing, runny eyes, and the like. However, there are a number of reactions that individuals will often refer to as an allergy. Gastrointestinal distress, for example, of the type that lactose-intolerant individuals may experience when consuming milk.

The World Allergy Organization reports that, quote:

It is generally accepted that food allergy affects approximately 2.5% of the general population, but the spread of prevalence data is wide, ranging from 1% to 10%

In 2008, the Centers for Disease Control in the United States reported that, quote:

From 1997 to 2007, the prevalence of reported food allergy increased 18% among children under age 18 years. Eight types of food account for over 90% of allergic reactions in affected individuals: milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soy, and wheat.

In 2007, a study carried out in Poland took a look at the prevalence of children’s allergies in urban and rural environments found that in general, children who live in urban environments tend to have a higher prevalence of allergies while those in rural environments do not tend to. As the Journal of the American Medical Association Network highlights, quote:

food allergy prevalence estimates from these recent national surveys exceed 9% of US adults, suggesting that food allergy may affect more US adults than previously acknowledged. Although some children with food allergy develop natural tolerance, others retain their food allergy as they enter adulthood. Adults can also develop new food allergies, and evidence suggests that certain food allergies (eg, shellfish and fin fish) may be more likely than others to develop during adulthood.

In other words, allergies aren’t really all that uncommon, and the things that we tend to refer to as allergies even more so. The prevalence seems to be growing, too, but even if that wasn’t the case, you or someone you know likely has an allergy to something.

The circadian rhythms that govern how we sleep are impacted by many of the things that around us, the things that we experience, and the environment that we live in. That environment includes the light and dark cycles around us – both natural and electric.

There have been a variety of studies done throughout the years on the impact that the natural rhythms of night and day have on human bodies. There was one particularly interesting study done in 2012 on the impact of long winter days on the individuals working in the arctic.

That study found that, when deprived of light for long periods of time, many individuals maintained some semblance of a 24 hour light cycle, though some do end up defaulting to cycles that are more or less than 24 hours.

While it’s easy to think that conditions such as Seasonal Affective Disorder are simply a function of latitude, that may not be the case. Quoting from a 2005 overview of Seasonal Affective Disorder :

An estimated 10 to 20 percent of recurrent depression cases follow a seasonal pattern.3 Although a summer pattern of recurrence is possible, the predominant pattern involves fall/winter depression with spring/summer remission. In U.S. community surveys, SAD prevalence ranges from 9.7 percent in New Hampshire to 1.4 percent in Florida.4 In North America, SAD prevalence increases with latitude, but the correlation is nonsignificant in other parts of the world.

In fact, it may be that the impact late nights and long nights have on our psychology is partially a function of the mindset we have going in. Quoting from Science Nordic:

Leibowitz and Vittersø found a correlation between how far north people lived in Norway and how positively they viewed winter and winter darkness. More importantly, “Vittersø and I found that positive thought patterns in winter were related to life satisfaction, positive emotions and seeking challenges that can lead to personal growth,” Leibowitz, an American psychology student, said. Vittersø emphasizes that the study has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and that the correlations they found do not mean causation.

Nevertheless, he says that the study suggests what might make life easier for Norwegians during a time of year that most people don’t really like. “We who live in Norway are probably not aware that we see so much to enjoy during the winter, because it is so normal for us,” Vittersø said. “But it is probably much less common to look at winter this way elsewhere in the world.”